The City of Dreaming Books

by Walter Moers

  Smyke gave Claudio Harpstick a signal. I can’t think why I noticed - it was only a twitch of one of his many little fingers - but I was instantly on the alert.

  I was going to warn the Shadow King, but he had also spotted the movement and forestalled me. With remarkable agility for someone so fat, Harpstick seized the candelabrum and raised it above his head. Before he could hurl it at Homuncolossus, however, his intended target pounced on him with a bestial snarl. It all happened as quickly as a door being slammed by an unexpected gust of wind. Homuncolossus dodged behind the Hoggling and, like a barber shaving a customer, slit his throat with one neat blow of his razor-sharp paper hand. Harpstick stood there for a few seconds, gargling with the blood in his gullet, and then collapsed. The candelabrum went rolling across the floor, the candles went out. The Shadow King had already returned to his former place and was thoughtfully inspecting his fingertips, from which Harpstick’s blood was dripping.

  ‘Well done, my boy!’ cried Smyke, clapping his numerous hands. ‘Did you see? He meant to set you on fire! He must have lost his wits! What incredible reflexes you possess! How strong I made you!’

  Homuncolossus ignored him.

  ‘Where you and I are concerned,’ he said, turning to me, ‘I’ve never pretended to you, never lied to you about my intentions. I once aroused your hopes unfairly by suggesting that I might exchange one prison for another, but that was only to get you away from Shadowhall Castle.’

  He gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

  ‘But I won’t return to the darkness,’ he said. ‘Never again, whatever the circumstances.’

  He turned and stared at the red velvet curtains.

  ‘There’s one more thing you should know about the Orm. If you wish to experience its power you must be able to see the sky, the sun and the moon. Down there I was dead because that power could flow through me no longer, and once you’ve experienced it you can’t live without it.’

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ Smyke demanded. ‘The Orm? Where does the Orm come into this?’

  ‘Don’t do it,’ I implored, my eyes filling with tears.

  ‘What mustn’t he do?’ Smyke asked helplessly. ‘Listen, friends, we need to talk! There’s nothing that can’t be talked about. Whatever you have in mind, let me in on it! Just think: Homuncolossus with his unique genius, Optimus with his youthful dynamism and me with my connections. Together we could rewrite the history of Zamonian literature!’

  ‘I told you once’, Homuncolossus said to me, ‘that it all depends how brightly you burn, remember? Till now I’ve been no more than an aimlessly roaming agglomeration of paper, but now I’m going to inscribe that paper with a message the city of Bookholm won’t forget in a hurry. My spirit will blaze more brightly than it has ever done; it will exert an influence no intellect, no writer or book has ever had.’ He walked towards the window.

  There was no way of dissuading him, I knew. I could only stand watching through my tears.

  ‘What’s he up to?’ cried Smyke. ‘What are you doing, my son?’

  ‘I want to feel the sun once more,’ Homuncolossus said quietly. ‘Just once more.’

  He was now standing in front of the curtains.

  ‘Don’t do it!’ I cried.

  Smyke had grasped the truth at last. His face transformed itself into a malign, twisted mask. ‘Yes!’ he hissed. ‘Go on! Do it!’

  Homuncolossus wrenched the curtains apart, and brilliant sunlight came streaming in. It surged over him like a wave and flooded the whole room, so bright that it hurt my eyes and made me cry out.

  ‘No!’ I shouted.

  But the Shadow King welcomed the midday sun with head erect and arms outstretched.

  ‘Yes!’ he said.

  ‘Yes!’ Smyke whispered, wringing half a dozen of his hands in delight. ‘I never thought you’d bring yourself to do it. That’s true strength, true greatness!’

  My dazzled, tear-filled eyes perceived Homuncolossus only as a dark figure silhouetted against a glaring expanse of light, just as I had seen him for the first time when he danced alone amid the fires in Shadowhall Castle. Thin grey threads of smoke were rising from his body. I could hear crackling, hissing sounds, and all at once the air was filled with an acrid smell. Homuncolossus turned round. His face, chest and arms were a mass of scorched, incandescent paper. Sparks leapt from the cracks in the ancient parchment and black smoke streamed up his body like rivulets of ink flowing upwards in defiance of every law of nature. Then, very slowly, he advanced on Pfistomel Smyke.

  Smyke’s triumphant smirk vanished. In his mind’s eye he had probably seen the Shadow King go up in a sheet of flame and turn to ashes beside the window, but now he was horrified to find that his creation still possessed the strength to move.

  Sheet after sheet of alchemical paper caught fire, hundreds of lambent flames were already writhing in the air, each a different colour. With a menacing hiss, sparks shot out of the multicoloured inferno and adhered to the surrounding wood and paper, setting them ablaze. Tiny fire devils flickered along the laboratory’s shelves and up its walls, igniting the wallpaper.

  The Shadow King strode on, steadily closing the gap between himself and Smyke, who had at last found the strength to retreat.

  ‘What do you want of me?’ he cried in a reedy falsetto.

  But Homuncolossus grew and grew, becoming ever brighter, an incandescent figure from which liquid fire was dripping. And then he started to laugh the rustling laugh of the Shadow King. It was a long time since I’d heard it and suddenly my tears ceased to flow, for I sensed that he was happy at last. Happy and free.

  He paused once more as he passed me and raised his hand in farewell, a crackling torch with white sparks gushing from it. He was now a single flame, a sight of unforgettable beauty. And for one brief moment, the space of a heartbeat only, though it might also have been my imagination, I thought I saw his eyes for the first and last time. They were sparkling with the unbridled happiness of a child.

  I too raised my hand in farewell and he turned back to Smyke, who was now slithering down the wooden ramp in a panic.

  ‘What do you want?’ Smyke called shrilly. ‘What do you want of me?’

  But the Shadow King merely followed him like a vortex of hissing flame that ignited all it touched. And he laughed as he descended into the cellar - he laughed with all his might. I could still hear him long after he had disappeared below ground.

  A flask exploded. I looked round as if awaking from a dream. That was when the full danger of the situation dawned on me. The whole laboratory was on fire: the tables and chairs, the wooden ramp and the beams in the walls, the shelves and books, the carpets and wallpaper, even the lengths of knot-writing suspended from the ceiling. Chemical fluids were boiling in the glass alembics, acids spurting, corrosive vapours and biting smoke rising into the air.

  The heat had set many of the absurd Bookemistic machines in motion. Their cogwheels were turning, their flaps opening and shutting as if they had come to life and were eager to escape the conflagration.

  Just before my cloak could catch fire I caught a last glimpse of the chest full of inestimably valuable books. It wasn’t a rational act on my part, just an instinctive desire to save at least one of them from destruction: I snatched up the topmost volume and fled outside.

  The Orm

  The street was quiet and deserted, the air fresh and cool: it was a perfectly normal sunny day in Bookholm. I had dreamt of this moment for so long, and now it meant nothing to me.

  I paused outside Pfistomel Smyke’s house and waited for the first wisps of smoke to seep through the shingled roof. Then I turned and walked off - slowly, because I had no further need to hurry. It took some time for any alarming noises to make themselves heard - bells ringing, a babble of agitated voices, the clatter of horse-drawn fire engines - but the smell of smoke soon pursued me as relentlessly as if the blazing Darkman of Bookholm himself were at my heels.

  Hear the loud Bo
okholmian bells -

  brazen bells!

  What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!

  In the startled ear of night

  how they screamed out their affright!

  Too much horrified to speak,

  they can only shriek, shriek . . .

  Those lines from Perla la Gadeon’s poem kept running through my head as I walked on, passing house after house, street after street and district after district until the City of Dreaming Books itself lay behind me. I had reached the city limits, where Bookholm and everything else had begun so unspectacularly. But I didn’t stop even then. I simply walked on staring doggedly ahead, further and further across the deserted plain.

  At last, dear readers, I summoned up the courage to pause and look back. The sun had set by now, and the burning city was surmounted by a cloudless, starry sky and an almost full moon.

  The Dreaming Books had awakened. Miles-high columns of black smoke were rising into the heavens fraught with paper transformed into weightless ash: the residue of incinerated thoughts. Swirling within them were myriads of sparks, every one a fiery word ascending ever higher to dance with the stars.

  And then I saw it up above: the Alphabet of the Stars. It sparkled in the firmament, clear and distinct, a spider’s web of silvery threads entwined amid the celestial bodies.

  Below, the bells continued their senseless tolling. The rustle of the countless awakening books reminded me sadly of the rustling laughter of my friend the Shadow King, the greatest writer of all time. It occurred to me only then that I had never asked him his real name. He, too, was ascending in the biggest, most terrible conflagration Bookholm had ever undergone. He, the original spark and author of that conflagration, was soaring heavenwards to become a star that would shine down for ever on a world too confined for a spirit as great as his.

  That was the moment when I first felt the Orm. It surged over me like a hot wind, but not from the fires of Bookholm. Originating in the uttermost depths of space, it swept through my head and filled it with a maelstrom of words that swiftly, within a few excited heartbeats, arranged themselves into sentences, pages, chapters and, finally, into the story you have just read, my faithful friends!

  And I joined in the Shadow King’s laughter, which now seemed to resonate from all directions, from the all-consuming flames of Bookholm and the stars of the firmament. I laughed and wept until no vestige of that frenzied feeling of joy remained within me.

  I recalled Al’s farewell recitation in the Leather Grotto, which now at last made sense to me. It was as if the author whose spirit lived on in that little Bookling had looked into the future on my behalf and foreseen this moment, the moment when I received the Orm:Had I but died an instant before this chance,

  I had liv’d a blessed time; for from this instant,

  there’s nothing serious in mortality;

  all is but toys; renown and grace is dead,

  the wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees

  is left for Bookhunters to brag of . . .

  Now, for the first time, I examined the book I had snatched from the inferno in Pfistomel Smyke’s laboratory. I could not repress a shudder when I saw that it was, of all things, The Bloody Book. Averting my gaze from the sight of the burning city, I walked on without another backward glance.

  And now, dear readers, you courageous friends who have so fearlessly accompanied me thus far - now you know how I came into possession of The Bloody Book and acquired the Orm. There is nothing more to tell.

  For this is where my story ends.

  Translator’s Postscript

  Although I esteemed it a privilege to select material for translation from Optimus Yarnspinner’s oeuvre, it proved to be an intellectual marathon. I devoted years to the task, overwhelmed and intimidated by the sheer magnitude of his output. Yarnspinner produced hundreds of novels, thousands of short stories and poems, and a score of monumental stage plays that took months to perform. He also wrote a number of books under pseudonyms: Thelonius Orm, Wilfred the Wordsmith, Hildegard Mythmaker and Oscar van Tripplestock, to name but a few. I eventually decided to proceed chronologically. The earliest book by Yarnspinner to be published in Zamonia was Memoirs of a Sentimental Dinosaur, but the first edition encompassed over 10,000 pages and would have taken me a lifetime to translate had it been published unabridged. That being so, I resolved to extract the first two chapters from the aforesaid novel and lump them together under the title The City of Dreaming Books. I trust I shall be forgiven for having taken such an editorial liberty, but I firmly believe that these fragments possess all the makings of a book in its own right.

  Walter Moers

  For all kinds of reasons, I express my thanks to Erchl Gangwolff, Tito Milchvers and Danilie von Derwesch.

  I am further indebted to Tito Milchvers for deciphering the symbols employed by Bookemistic numerologists.

  1 Translator’s Note: Anyone fleetingly acquainted with Zamonian history or literature will know that Lindworm Castle is a hollowed-out rock projecting from the Dullsgard Plateau not far from Loch Loch in western Zamonia. The castle is inhabited by Lindworms that walk on their hind legs, are capable of speech and cherish a high regard for creative writing. As to how this came about, less well-informed readers should consult pp. 41-69 in Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures. They will not, however, find this essential to their further perusal of the present book.

  2 Translator’s Note: Zamonian exchange rates and units of measurement are such a complex subject that they merit a book of their own. This actually exists in the shape of the hundred-volume Bunkle, in which the druidical mathematician and economist Aristocious Bunkle meticulously listed and explained every one of Zamonia’s relevant systems. It is only natural, in a continent whose inhabitants range in size from peas to trees, that the most varied forms of currency and units of measurement exist. The Bonsai Mite’s pyxl is the Turniphead’s forzz, and if I were to translate both words as a metre I would be wrong each time, even though the Bonsai Mite and the Turniphead both mean a unit of measurement which, relative to their average physical size, corresponds to a metre. And I haven’t even mentioned the Hackonian hakk or the Voltigorkian gork! The inhabitants of Lindworm Castle - and, thus, Yarnspinner himself - employ an extremely complicated system of measurement that is strictly poetic in orientation, embodying units such as hexameters and metaphorical density.

  There are races of Zamonian giants whose small change is as big as millstones, whereas life forms such as Nocturnomaths use a currency based on the telepathic exchange of doctoral dissertations. But, despite all these different conceptions of ‘money’, the pyra, a silver coin shaped like a tiny pyramid, is a universally recognised means of settling accounts, especially in commercial centres like Bookholm.

  For descriptive purposes I have taken the liberty of translating Zamonian units of measurement into our own European units whenever Yarnspinner speaks of relative sizes, distances or weights. For authenticity’s sake, however, I have chosen not to translate the pyra, which roughly corresponds in value to one Roman sestertius in the time of Virgil.

  3 Translator’s Note: My apologies, dear readers, but I can only guess at the meaning of the verb ‘glunk’. I devised the neologism myself as a translation of a Zamonian word I had never met before. Probably drawn from Lindworm Castle dialect, it almost certainly describes something which only Lindworms do with their teeth in order to produce a sound expressive of appreciation. I myself spent several days trying to make appreciative noises with my teeth, but to no avail.

  4 Translator’s Note: Those who are unacquainted with Optimus Yarnspinner’s biography may be interested to know that this was a fateful encounter destined to have important repercussions on his subsequent career. Laptantidel Latuda, who was to become Yarnspinner’s arch enemy, persistently harried him with scathing reviews when he began to be published.

  5 Translator’s Note: Among Zamonian scientists, Leyden Manikins are a favourite means of testing the effe
cts of chemicals and medicaments without having to experiment on living life forms. A Leyden Manikin consists largely of peat from the Graveyard Marshes of Dullsgard with an admixture of Demerara Desert sand, adipose tissue, glycerine and liquid resin. These components are moulded into a manikin and animated with the aid of an alchemical battery.

  If inserted in a glass receptacle and immersed in nutrient fluid, a Leyden Manikin will keep for about a month. It displays all the behavioural characteristics of a live creature, reacting to heat, cold and all manner of chemical compounds.

  6 Translator’s Note: It may be helpful at this point if I give a brief description of the trombophone, an instrument with which Yarnspinner rightly assumed his Zamonian readers to be thoroughly conversant.

  Trombophones are the only musical instruments capable of being bred. The trombophone shellfish, which derives its name from its distant resemblance to the trombone and euphonium, lives in coral reefs off the western shores of Zamonia, but especially in the vicinity of the city of Murkholm. It has an extremely long, tubular shell that develops into a convoluted knot, and it fills the depths of the sea, for as long as it survives there, with a ghostly kind of music not unlike the singing of whales.

  Murkholmian beachcombers were the first to hit on the idea of using empty trombophone shells, which were regularly washed ashore on their coast, as musical instruments. Having fitted these with mouthpieces and valves, they developed in time into virtuosi who could coax the most delicate notes from their trombophone shells. Later they took to breeding trombophones and converting their shells into musical instruments for sale throughout Zamonia.